Sorry about reposting on the same subject, but i never know if people look at old posts. Thanks for your help guys. The ports are the slower 8250 uart, so i am going to see if i get the faster card. is there anyway of recognising the card by sight alone (i might look in some dead machines)? I think ie3 is faster but i can't navigate because i don't have a mouse at the moment = tab just switches between the address bar and the toolbar How do I do this? And how do I maximise the window without a mouse in ie4 (i don't seem to be able to get at the top left hand box to select alt-x)? No-one would happen to have a spare serial port card or a 9 pin to 25 pin male/female adapter, would they? and also, can i get a telnet program to work with the iexplorer stack and dialer? and is there a freephone free ISP in the UK? dave

Hi Dave, If you run MSD in a DOS box under Windows, MSD may erroneously report that your com2 port uses the slower 8250 UART when in fact it may actually be the 16550 UART. Exit Windows and run MSD in DOS mode and see what it says. To get around without the mouse, first get into the menu bar and then use the left/right arrow keys to toggle between the menu items. Eventually it will jump up to the control box in the upper left corner. When the control box is highlighted, use the up/down arrow keys to move between menu selections. I'm on the other side of the pond, so I don't know anything about UK ISPs. Sorry.

Press the ALT key to highlight the menu bar.

There may be some way of looking at a multi-I/O card or just a serial card and telling if it has an 8250 or 16550 UART but I don't know what it is. I just looked at 3 old I/O cards that I have laying around and there is nothing on them that I see to obviously identify them as 8250s (which I know they are). You can make a slightly educated guess. If the electronic components on the card are somewhat large-(talking about capacitors and resistors), the chances are better that the serial port(s) on that card are slow. This however is not anywhere near 100% Newer cards tend to have most of the components in integrated circuit chips.

You can try this to analyse your system: CTS, Com Port,IRQ and Modem Diagnostics Hope this helps you